Showing a courage and candor that’s been in short supply among museum officials navigating the choppy waters of racial tensions, political unrest and economic difficulty, Salvador Salort-Pons has publicly engaged with a Change.org petition calling for his removal. – Lee Rosenbaum
Tag: 05.06.20
Facebook’s New Content Oversight Board Could End Up Overseeing A Lot More Than Facebook
“In designing this new organization, Facebook’s leaders … formed a separate legal trust with an initial $130 million investment from Facebook. But they also empowered that trust to both accept funding from sources outside Facebook and to form companies of its own. That structure would ensure Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t just shut down the board if he didn’t like its decisions. But it also opens up the possibility that the trust might some day spin off additional oversight boards for, say, YouTube, Twitter or any other platform that makes content moderation decisions.” – Protocol
85 Years Ago FDR Created The Federal Writers Project. Could We Do Another One?
The Writers Project had a huge impact on writers in America. Now, as writers and publishers are struggling, is it time for another FWP? Short answer: not likely, but a guy can dream… – Los Angeles Times
The Semantics Of Cooties (Speaking Of Contagion) And Other Children’s Semi-Nonsense Words
“In a kid’s world, cooties and other similar contagions may not be real — but they’re deadly serious. The North American children’s lore of cooties is ‘a social contaminant that pass[es] from one child to another, a form of interpersonal pollution.’ … Children who play this game learn and absorb concepts familiar to a public health emergency” (such as immunization — remember cooties shots?), “but on their own strange terms. … [The] search for a satisfactory meaning might not mean much when it comes to children. Because nonsense makes a lot of sense in a kid’s world.” – JSTOR Daily
Jean Erdman, Dancer/Choreographer/Stage Director, Dead At 104
“A former principal dancer for Martha Graham, Ms. Erdman first came to wide notice as a choreographer in the 1940s, and she remained in the vanguard of the field for decades. She later created performance pieces for the Theater of the Open Eye, an avant-garde New York stage she founded in 1972 with her husband, Joseph Campbell, the scholar of literature and myth.” – The New York Times
Facebook’s New Independent Oversight Board ‘Has All The Hallmarks Of The UN, Except Potentially Much Less Effective’
Kara Swisher: “I am not trying to be glib here, because solving the problem of how to deal with speech across the largest and most unwieldy communications platform in human history … may be beyond the capabilities of anyone .. given that Facebook and [Mark] Zuckerberg have purposefully created a system that is ungovernable.” – The New York Times
Two California Galleries Defy Lockdown Orders And Reopen Because ‘Art Is So Important’
One gallery owner said, “Art is so important. We’re more important than other businesses. I want to be taken seriously.” Another said, “We refuse to die here in the tunnel. We’re pushing through to the light.” Her husband tweeted a quote from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. – Artnet
It Wasn’t Just A Once-In-A-Lifetime Exhibition, It Was A Once-In-History Show. COVID Sank It For Good
Years of preparation — conservation, research and catalog writing, loan negotiations, insurance, shipping arrangements, and more — went into the big Van Eyck show that opened in February in Ghent. And that city’s famous altarpiece, newly restored, was at the heart of the event, the largest-ever assemblage of the artist’s work. The pandemic shut the exhibit down, and journalist Sophie Haigney explains why there’s no hope of postponing or rescheduling it. – The New York Times
What Will Concert Life Look Like When Things Reopen?
In New York—and likely everywhere—the venues best able to answer these questions are the smallest ones. They are so because they present music often at the edge of economic and cultural viability, and are geared to survive with limited audiences. Reopening for tiny, restricted crowds would be pretty much par for the course. – Van
Spain’s First Movie With Sound To Be Directed By A Woman Discovered In Archive
“[Maria Forteza’s documentary] Mallorca, an eight-minute, black-and-white sweep across the Balearic island inspired by the music of the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz, was donated to the national film archive in 1982 … For 38 years, Mallorca languished in the collection, wrongly identified as a silent 1926 film made by a male director.” – The Guardian